The remaining days of our Bahamas vacation were a mostly spent at the Atlantis water park. All of the slides were now open! That's good because by now, all of the cruise ships (up to 5 at a time) have been returning to Nassau after Irene altered their schedules. This meant a large influx of visitors, and having more rides open reduces the lines. However, the best line reducer is a cloudburst!

With Irene now thundering up the eastern seaboard, the weather in Nassau returned to relative normal. The sun was bright with a few passing thunderstorms. We awoke, had breakfast and packed to move back to the adjacent Comfort Suites. Today, our neighbors Chad and Jen and their kids would be sailing in to Nassau on board a Disney cruise ship.

"Aftermath" might be a strong word. Usually such a word is reserved for events on the scale of Mount St. Helens or Katrina, and here in Nassau it wasn't anything quite that bad.

Hurricane Irene's eye passed about 50 miles to the northeast of us, however, due to the way the hurricane had evolved, we were in a relatively calm pocket despite our proximity to it. The winds here were in the range of tropical storm force, not the hurricane force winds as predicts. The rainfall was also much less than it could have been.

We awoke to another beautiful sunny day. We were half expecting to see signs of Irene, but there were none yet. It was a little breezy, however.

We prepared to pack a suitcase to move to our backup room at the Atlantis. As we packed, a squall moved in and we thought it was the first band from Irene, but it quickly passed and it turns out that it was just a standard tropical cloudburst.

Earlier in the year we booked a week-long vacation to Nassau, Bahamas to celebrate two graduations: Hayley from high school, and Jenn with her software development degree. Over the course of the summer out plans started to solidify. We would be staying at a hotel on "Paradise Island" which is the same island that the famous Atlantis Resort resides. Not our typical vacation, but the package price couldn't be beat.

This spring, I entered the annual lottery for permits to hike the Enchantments area of the Apline Lakes District of the central Cascades. The Enchantments is an alpine valley that contains a chain of beautiful lakes nestled in jagged granite pinnacles. Its relative proximity to Leavenworth meant that it was in danger of over-use so they implemented a permit system to restrict access.